Lot 112: Eugène Cuvelier 1837-1900 , 'à belle croix, près du clovis'

albumen print, numbered '258' by the photographer in the negative, mounted, titled in an unidentified hand in pencil on the mount, matted, 1860s

measurements note 10 by 13½ in. (25.4 by 34.3 cm.)

Monterey Museum of Art, Passion and Precision: Photographs from the Collection of Margaret W. Weston , January - April 2003

This print: Passion and Precision: Photographs from the Collection of Margaret W. Weston
(Monterey Museum of Art, 2003, in conjunction with the exhibition), p. 36
Ulrike Gauss, Henning Weidemann, and Daniel Challe, Eugène Cuvelier
(Stuttgart, 1996, in conjunction with the exhibition), no. 258

Cuvelier made this image on Le Plateau de Belle-Croix, in the north-central portion of the forest of Fontainebleau. The Clovis referred to in the photograph?s title is the forest?s famed oak tree, Le Clovis , named for the legendary Frankish king ( circa 466 - 511). The Barbizon artist Théodore Rousseau referred to Belle-Croix as ?a wild area studded with ancient oaks, among which are the Napoleon Oak and the Clovis? (Greg M. Thomas, Art and Ecology in 19 th -Century France: The Landscapes of Théodore Rousseau, Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 217). Ulrike Gauss, in her catalogue raisonné of Eugène Cuvelier's photographs, accounts for only one print of this image: the albumen print offered here. Cuvelier?s study of the Le Clovis is illustrated in Gauss?s book as no. 339.